Introducing the Longevity Research Institute

Vaniver is right.

The mainstream biogerontology perspective is that there's an evolutionarily conserved "survival program", probably developed for surviving famines, that can slow the aging process somewhat. This is the stuff you'll find in Cynthia Kenyon's research, for instance. The hope is that you can find drugs that stimulate these pathways, and thereby slow down the incidence of age-related diseases. This is the approach LRI is taking.

The SENS position, as I understand, is that this won't work. As you go up from yeast to nematodes to flies to mice, "long-lived" mutants live less long, and perhaps by the time we get to humans these genetic alterations (or drugs that simulate them) won't be long-lived at all. SENS instead wants to work on reversing the damage caused by aging.

I don't know with high confidence whether SENS's skepticism is right; but even if they are, their research program seems to involve a lot of open questions in basic science that would take a long time to resolve.

Give to SENS if you want to invest in basic research that might one day reverse aging altogether; give to LRI to accelerate translational research into treatments that might lead to modest healthspan extension in the next decade or two. (Or give to both!) They're complementary strategies.

I asked Sarah this a while ago, and her answer (as I recall it) was that SENS is targeting more basic science stuff that's on the left side of the 'valley of death,' and so is orthogonal (and complementary to) the sort of work LRI is doing, and will also likely take longer to result in treatments in humans.

I wouldn't give it very high chance of success, maybe 10-20% of proving something which increases human lifespan by at least 15 years

Those numbers sound not just very high, but practically stratospheric! Seems like it could have orders of magnitude worse odds than that and still be a great donation target.

Just donated as well. Eager to hear more.

Practical constraints. The main contributor to the cost of a lifespan study is the cost of upkeep for the mice -- so it's proportional to number of mice and length of the study. Testing 50 compounds at once means raising 50x the money at once (which is out of reach at the moment) and may also run into constraints of the capacity of labs/CROs.

The announcement post for RAISE was specifically removed from the front page, with Oliver stating the reason was that there was an explicit LW policy to not allow organization announcements on the front page [LW(p) · GW(p)]. Can we perhaps get some clarity on this policy?